Renewable Electricity Storage Attracts Stimulus Funding

Topics:

Share This Post:

Solar Electrical Plant, Mojave Desert, CA

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently announced that $100 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding will be made available to accelerate innovation in green technology, increase America's competitiveness, and create new jobs. Chu states:

"This is about unleashing the American innovation machine to solve the energy and climate challenge, while creating new jobs, new industries and new exports for America's workers."

Grid-Scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage (GRIDS), often referred to as massive electricity storage (MES), is of particular interest to chemical engineers, and has been the subject of several CEP articles and a white paper by AIChE's Government Relations Committee.

Conceptually, MES can be likened to a huge battery that is connected to the grid and to a wind generator. The battery stores energy when the amount generated exceeds the demand from the grid, and releases stored energy when the demand exceeds the amount generated. The battery allows dispatchable power to be delivered to the grid.

This new funding opportunity aims to help the U.S. assume global technology and manufacturing leadership in the emerging and potentially huge global market for stationary electricity storage infrastructure. The program seeks to develop revolutionary new storage systems that provide energy, cost, and cycle life comparable to pumped hydropower, but which are modular and can be widely implemented at any location across the power grid. Specifically, two areas will be considered:

Ultimately, technologies developed through this program will be scalable to the megawatt and megawatt-hour levels of power and energy capacity. This program focuses on technology prototyping and proof-of-concept R&D efforts rather than pilot demonstration projects.

To ensure that the market and operational reforms necessary to efficiently integrate variable energy resources (VERs) into the nation's power grid, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is examining its regulatory policies and seeking comments on it should reform any of its rules or procedures. Read about that in my blog post "Policy Options for Integrating Renewable Energy into the Grid."